Posts tagged as weeknotes (page 12)

Week 52’s primary focus was Housedon: a rebuild of a content-driven site for an arts charity.

The work came in two parts: building up Dean‘s designs in modular, flat HTML, and then building out the WordPress code to back the whole thing.

The flat HTML went fairly smoothly, but the site build is taking long than planned. This is partly down to the amount of content migration necessary.

Content migration is a necessary part of any web rebuild: site architectures change, page requirements change, and sometimes copy needs updating to reflect that as well.

In this case, though it was suggested I could leave that until later, it was clear that wasn’t the case; most of the old site was not stored in a database, but as flat PHP files with inline functions; importing the old content required placing these elements into WordPress, stripping out inline function calls and either replacing them with template elements or shorttags; and so forth. Then, the old content from the small WordPress install that powered part of the site was moved over.

As the week went on, we kept finding new pages buried in the old site, that would need migrating over – and working out how best to do that.

The end result is turning out well, though: every content object is now being stored in the CMS, a few necessary pieces of code have been ported over, and Dean’s focus on mobile-first mean the site works well at all screen-sizes. We’ve used SoundManager 2 to make the site’s audio much less of a bother to play, as well.

WordPress may not seem like an obvious choice for such work in 2013; why not something custom-built, or a flat site generated in something like Jekyll?

The answer to the former is easy: because the budget, both time- and financial- wouldn’t stretch to it – not to mention the impositions on hosting an application server makes. The latter is a more reasonable suggestion – but whilst the output format is swift and robust, the editing process for a static-site generator makes far more demands on editorial staff. In this case, a web-UI for a CMS they likely know makes sense.

But there’s still scope to tailor it to our needs. I’m a strong advocate of modelling information appropriately, so as well as Posts and Pages, we have four other Top Level Objects – Events, Texts, and so forth. These can all be templated separately, given appropriated metadata through custom fields in their own areas of the admin site, and as such, the data-model feels much more robust and future-proof (in the way a system built around WordPress’ categories taxonomy wouldn’t be).

At the end of the week, I was a little behind where I wanted to be, but the work we had done was solid and secure. A few more days next week should wrap things up. It’s been good to keep my hand in in a few particular spaces I hadn’t worked in so much over the past few months – practical front-end development, in particular.

I also had a lunch this week to discuss the previous week’s work on Hegdon which went well: a tricky project, that often felt like it was slipping through my hands at times, but a good discussion around the work that I hope revealed a few things to the client.

A few different focuses this week: a meeting about Housedon, an upcoming piece of work next week; two days on Hegdon, a short interaction design exploration – research, wireframes, and documentation; a short exploratory meeting with some new contacts; and a lunchtime talk at the ODI.

I write weeknotes for myself mainly as a diary (and Maciej’s written about the value of work diaries): to look back upon over time; to keep track of where my head is. Some weeks are deep in a single project; some spread thinly amongst several; some in business development.

This is week 50. Although really, it should be week 51: I made a mistake somewhere. I know this because on Friday, the copy of myself that lives a year ago on Foursquare went to its leaving do.

So: an adjustment to weeknotes: let’s assume this is really week 51. And: how a year passes. A year ago, I’d be about to begin Spirits Melted Into Air. It’s been quite a year. Yearnotes should, I think, be forthcoming. But for now: onwards.

Week 49 saw the launch of The Literary Operator, previously known as Sore around these parts. I’ve written about the project previously, but since then, it’s been displayed at Brighton Digital Late. It was really pleasing to see just how people engaged with it; some, fascinated by how it might work; some curious or frustrated by its quality of prose; some, still marvelling at its Spooky Action At A Distance. It cranked out prose all night, and made a lot of people smile.

Other than my trip to Brighton, I spent some time talking to PAN about a few issues around Hello Lamp Post going forward, and also set up a small piece of content-oriented work that’s known as Housedon. To finish the week: a few days off, hacking away on a personal project and seeing the sights in Edinburgh.

Three main focuses for Week 48.

Firstly, bringing Sore into land. This week, that meant sourcing a few last elements for the installation, and working on a short film to promote the project. So a week of ordering books, composing music, and stitching a short film together. That’ll be out very shortly.

I also spent a day wrapping up Muncaster: decommissioning various services we no longer needed, and then spending the rest of the day analysing some data from the project. Nothing vastly complex, but useful to get a better picture of how people played with Hello Lamp Post, and also to be able to express more stories about the project to our partners.

And, finally, on Thursday, a short lunch about a brief piece of design work, now known as Hegdon: a few days of interaction design in the coming weeks, which will be a nice workout and change of pace
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Week 48. Week 49 next: time to launch new work.

Very little to report from Week 47: I spent part of it at Webdagene, delivering The Material World, which I’m aiming to get the text of online in the next three-four weeks. And then I had a break in Oslo, which turned out to be a lovely city. Back in the game come Week 48.

Somewhat late weeknotes this week, owing to various travel and engagements.

Week 46 was largely focused on getting Sore to launch, and putting the final touches on a talk.

For the first part, that meant lots of what was called cutting and sticking at primary school – only this time I was armed with spraymount, mount-cutters, and a scalpel. Lots of edges to the installation to finish off. Also, a small amount of product photography, which necessitated rigging up the off-camera lighting around my dining table and trying to document the artefact itself.

This was so that the project could be previewed at Improving Reality, where it was decloaked as The Literary Operator: an art installation made as a collaboration with the writer Jeff Noon. Lighthouse have a brief page about it, and I hope to share more about it very shortly.

The reason I’ve not got a post about the Literary Operator this second is because of various travel: Brighton on Thursday/Friday (where I also stayed for dConstruct, which tickled some new thoughts in my head, and led to many lovely conversations with chums and the like), and I’m now writing this on a hotel bed in Norway. I’m in Oslo for Webdagene, where I’ll be delivering a talk called The Material World. You’ll be able to see it live on Tueday 10th September on the Webdagene website – 1215 BST, if you’re interested.

Week 46 was primarily about bringing both the Literary Operator and The Material World into land. The latter will be delivered on 10th September; the former will have its official launch at Brighton Digital Late on the 26th, at the Brighton Museum. Week 47 is spent in Norway, and come Week 48, I should be back in the world, bringing the Literary Operator’s installation to life.

A short week, owing to the summer Bank Holiday on Monday.

I’m pretty firm about doing everything in my power, as a freelancer, to take bank holidays and the like. Yes, it’s a Monday like any other. But it’s also time when many of my friends are off, and it’s good to be in sync with the rest of the world. And they have value for yourself, as well; not just enforced time off, but a space to see what your brain looks like outside work. Michael Lopp touched on this in his excellent post about the nature of work this week:

This is why vacations are essential. They hold up the mirror and show how much energy you’re spending simply to achieve baseline steady state in your day.

It’s useful to be reminded where my head is. It turns out that the answer is: running a little hot. Work progresses well, but right now it tends to involve a million tiny tasks. Those tasks are often completed quickly, but they weigh heavy until they are. There’s a high cost of motion at the moment, but it comes down as I tick things off – and lists are helping a lot.

My main focus in week 45 is Sore. I went down to Brighton on Wednesday to demonstrate it, which went very well, and opened up discussion about its final exhibition. It also set up the work for the rest of the week – bits of work on the public website, and more materials to be acquired for the installation.

I note this week that Watershed have released their own film about Hello Lamppost; it’s a nice summary of the project, and some of our thinking behind it. (It also contains the only handheld tracking shot of me hammering at code to date. Yes, I really do hit the keyboard that hard, as any former office mates will tell you.)

Next week sees continued progress on Sore, which I’ll be giving an early preview of at Improving Reality. I’ll also be down in Brighton for dConstruct, so if you’re around and want to talk, do say hi.

Most of the week was taken up with finishing writing – and then finessing – The Material World, the talk I’ve been writing. On Friday night, I delivered a somewhat truncated version of it at LDNIA, which seemed to go down well – a relief.

The full 45-minute version of it will be at Webdagene in Oslo next month, and I should have a full text of it online shortly after, if you aren’t able to attend.

One thing that was pleasing to note was that even though the LDNIA version was a bit of a ‘radio edit’, the questions that people asked touched on the section of the talk I left out. That was a good sign for the final version – but also meant we could continue the dialogue in some interesting directions. Thanks to Andrew, Martin and Matthew for inviting me to speak.

Writing’s always a very intensive process for me, so the rest of the week was spent on some more restful admin tasks. But I also found time to continue some work on Sore: acquiring the last few materials for the installation and preparing them, as well as small tweaks to the code. Next week I’ll be taking it to Brighton to demonstrate to my collaborators and commissioners.

I also chatted about some interesting new ideas or business proposals.

One, a discussion with a designer about integrating a particular kind of technology into his work; I’m not expert enough to implement it, but well aware of its limitations, so we discussed some ways to constrain the technological demands and give him a better space to design within. It was a super-interesting conversation, and I look forward to hearing more about it.

The other was a more straight new business enquiry; not something, in the end, I could take up, but interesting nontheless, and hopefully there’ll be other ways to work with that organisation. My contact there apologised for ‘phoning me up out of the blue‘ – but, as I pointed out, this is just how new business works – and as a freelancer, I like to be phoned up out of the blue with an idea or enquiry. Even if I can’t always take it, it might lead to other work in the future – so is always valuable. I’m pretty much tied up til the end of September, but looking for work thereafter, so if you’re interested in the sort of thing I do – do get in touch. And if you aren’t quite sure what I do: email anyway! It’d be good to hear from you.

Two main focuses for week 43.

Firstly, Sore. This week focused on packaging Sore up into its final chassis. That had two distinct phases.

On Monday, I built the final electronics board for it. This took the two boards I’d been prototyping with – one for breaking out high-current power to both a pair of wires and micro-USB, and one handling all the IO – and consolidate them onto a single board, with carefuly layout and breaking out lots of things to headers, so that they’re easily removable. I’ve learned my lesson before about hard-wiring too much.

Then, on Tuesday, I started drilling the front-panel to the plans I’d made in Illustrator. I’ve said it before: boxes will chew you up. Cutting plastic feels very final – there’s no way to revert to an old commit, so to speak. So the day was spent carefully measuring, drilling, cutting and filing – and hopefully not disturbing my studio-mates too much.

It took about as long as I’d expected, but at the end of the day, we had real progress: a sealed unit, which works simply by plugging it into the mains and flicking the switch on the front. Sore has gone from a tangle of cables, components and software on my desk, to a thing. Soon, I’ll be able to talk about what that thing is.

The rest of the week took a different talk: working on a new talk, which I’ll be delivering at Webdagene, and also in prototype form next week at LDNIA.

The writing process is often particularly hard work. The output is usually good, but making new things – and making them well – is always painful, and I spent much of the week pushing the words through the garlic press of my brain and onto the page. Once they’re on the page, I can manipulate and structure and edit, but until then, there’s nothing else to do. So that was my focus: get the draft out. It took a while to build up velocity, but appeared to be taking shape towards the end of the week, leaving the beginning of next week to hone it into a performable, visual talk.

I should note: I write my talks longhand, pretty much. It sounds like a lot of work, but I find it helps me structure them much better, not to mention stopping me running away with myself, telling punchlines too early, and so forth. Structure’s really important to me, when it comes to writing, and longhand makes it much easier to structure plot beats. My secret weapon when it comes to structure is a lot of blank playing cards.

Anyhow: soldering, drilling, writing this week; equal parts mental and manual effort. Pretty satisfying.

A short week, what with returning from holiday.

Almost all my attention was focused onto Sore. A good meeting occurred in the middle of the week to discuss the commission, working out a few details of how to present the work, which really helped to give it some more shape.

Otherwise, I’ve been ordering the final components, planning out how to drill and cut the hardware, working out final component layouts and continuing to chip away at the code; Tuesday saw a key part of the infrastructure get sussed, and by Friday, I had some nice new text-generation routines working.

I’m pleased with where it is, though I’m beginning to have to bring it in to land shortly. But that’s for next week. As it was: good to slowly get back on top of things.

Weeknotes for Week 41 will be brief, I think, if only because they’re late.

Lots of little bits this week. My main work for myself this week was pushing ahead on Sore; by the end of the week, I had an end-to-end demo video to send to my collaborator and producer. I like video for this simply because it’s a hardware project; ultimately, there should be no visible computation, so being able to show it working end-to-end without manual intervention is exciting progress. Really satisfying work.

I did a short internal talk on Wednesday evening for a company, so a few days were spent rejigging it for the specific new audience. That seemed to go down well.

There was a short piece of work to slowly decommission Concert Club, which has reached the end of its prototype period. It was nice to take the time to wind something down properly: disabling long-running processes, scaling back server resources, leaving it up as an archive. Nothing’s worse than removing a site you worked on from the face of the world, and having to rely on archive.org to recover it.

I had another mentoring session with Michael, the film producer I’m working with through CreateInnovate. Good to catch up, and to see how last month’s session had percolated and come to fruition.

And, on Tuesday, I spent a day with PAN, working over some of the snaglist on Hello Lamppost and thinking a little about the future.

I have one of this weeks every couple of months: lots of little fragments, winding some things down, building others up; it feels bitty at the time, but lots of things move on as a result. It’s the kind of week that makes weeknotes really valuable.

Just before Week 40 began, we’d launched Hello Lampppost. The first week after a project launch is always a hard time to schedule: what problems are going to emerge in production – what are the issues of scale you might not have predicted.

By and large, though, it was a quiet week on Muncaster: a few minor fixes here and there, some performance tweaks, but, touch wood, no crises, which gave me some space to take it easy after Week 39’s exertions.

Not too easy, though – the thoughts at the back of my head that had been pushed to the back because of project-launch were now demanding their own space. That led to pushing several ideas forward:

• noticeable progress on Sore: rigging up all the hardware and proving the CPU doesn’t fall over; building a little “power distribution” board so I can power high current devices and a Raspberry Pi off a single PSU; getting all the necessary libraries in place. This felt like a big leap forward for a single afternoon
• Hacking together a very early prototype of Watchcroft, a game I’m tinkering with for my own sake. A few hours’ work led to a prototype controller (built out of a Freescale FRDM board pretending to be a HID joystick) and a prototype of the game mechanic in Unity. It’s very much not a game yet, but the thing I hoped would be entertaining is, and I think there’s a game to be made out of it. Not for a while though – I think I’m putting this on hold until late September, when a lot more client work is out of the way.
• A small piece of maintenance work on Firle: fixing outdate libraries, adding a piece of functionality that’d been needed for a while, and restoring functionality the broke in library updates. This ended up necessitating some time in Browerstack, which is becoing pretty indispensible (and saves me filling up my SSD with VMs).

So, despite intending to have a quiet, cooling-down week, I ended up doing quite a bit; not as easy to turn my brain off as I’d perhaps hoped, but moved lots of little things forward, and nice to think about other project alongside Hello Lamp Post again. Next week moves into more concerted prototyping/alpha on Sore, and a talk for a client.

Weeknotes are a day late this week – and for good reason.

I spent Week 39 working on Hello Lamp Post – Monday to Wednesday from the studio in Shoreditch, and then decamping to Watershed on Thursday until the beginning of this week to launch the project into the world.

Needless to say, a busy week: lots of features to be wrapped up, content to be refined, and plussing to be done. We hammered our way through the project until well into Saturday night, but come the launch event on Sunday, it was in good shape.

I will be entirely honest: I find launches hard, and do my absolute best to avoid “crunch”: it really doesn’t suit the way I work; long nights tend to introduce as many bugs as I fix. Thankfully, we had a relatively sane launch week (as these things go): lots of teamwork, some late nights working away, lots of eating well, and watching the sun go down from the Arnolfini fairly regularly.

There were, of course, hairy moments (most notably, a strange set of eigenbugs that were solved with the discovery that twilio-ruby isn’t threadsafe). But it all came off in the end. And I’m especially pleased with how effective the final week was: there’s a great deal to be said for getting the team in a single location, with only one thing on our minds. In that final haul, we really moved the project on a lot, and could tell we had something on our hands when we sat playing with it on Saturday night, all chuckling at what was happening in our hands as if it was something alive, and not something we’d made.

I’d primarily been focusing on the technology of the project in that final week, but there’s so much more to it than just the code. There’s the content within the experience; all the marketing and advertising; the graphic branding that’s permeated Bristol; the PR efforts; the beautiful models we’re using as an installation to promote the project; all manner of little details, all of which have come together.

When you’re in the middle of it all, it’s hard to see the whole; I always find that especially hard. I went to the launch party still a bit nervous, waiting for the emails from Exceptional, the people darting up to me with bugs.

And none of that happened. What happened was: people had fun. They surprised us. They told the objects storied, they laughed at the jokes, they were surprised by what one another had said. We drank champagne on College Green, and all was right with the world. By 4pm, I was out of the project-mines, and back in the world, and I could see what we’d made. It was pretty good.

All of which is a long-winded but personal way of saying what launches feel like for me, especially launches of creative works. When you’re in the mine, it’s hard to have any perspective. It’s very satisfying to see the view I got on Sunday when I came out. Thanks to Ben, Gyorgyi, and Sam, the rest of the core Hello Lamp Post team; to Clare, Verity, and all at Watershed; to Justin, our helping hands throughout that final week; and to all the collaborators throughout the project. I’ll write more about it formally soon, but in the context of weeknotes, it’s still important to say these things.

Week 39, then: Hello Lamp Post finally released into the world, advertised to a city, and already surprising and delighting us. It’s a privilege to have the opportunity to make such work, and – as I often say – to make the world a little more weird.

Week 38: two weeks to go before Playable City launches.

The telephony code is roughly where I want it to be, which is good; there’s a big content influx going on in the run up to launch, and any tweaks to the logic will come in response to what it feels like with the final language in place.

The main focus of this week’s work was the public website: shelling out the basic back-end structure, and focusing on two live visualisations that are probably the most technically complex part of it.

The public site is entirely separate to the telephony application: that way any popularity on the public internet won’t affect the gameplay experience. So to represent any kind of data on the public site, we need to build some data-emitting endpoints on the telephony application. Once those were in place, spitting out sanely formatted JSON, I could start prototyping the visualisation around that data format.

The visualisations began as single HTML pages, using static inline JSON to seed them. Once I’d built up the representation of that code, moving to D3‘s d3.json method to suck the data over the network was not so hard – but it’s important to break these problems down in the right order, and the most important problem in this case was: given some JSON, how do we build both animation and interaction around it?

(As a side note: despite the evented complexity of what’s going on, I’m reminded again of how much I enjoy working in D3; one of my favourite New Things I Learned This Year and well worth your time if you’ve not encountered it: it’s useful for all manner of things).

By the end of the week, we had made a good amount of progress: the beginnings of a public site, the IA and design nearly complete, the beginnings of a back end, and importantly, the complex viz largely prototyped (meaning all that was left would be to incoprorate the actual designs/markup).

Almost nothing other than Playable City this week, as things should be: the only other things of note were a few discussions about workshops in July/August, and components for Sore slowly arriving.

Two main focuses this week: Playable City, which moves ever-closer to launch, and Sore, which is in early development stages.

The majority of Playable City work focused on two completely new kind of object. Most objects behave in the same way, and follow the same rules. However, we wanted to add some objects that behaved totally differently. One type has something that resembles a “dialogue tree” in it, with a degree of branching; the other is how objects advertising the game – posters, banners, and the objects they’re attached to – behave.

The latter was a variant of what we already have, and not too complex to rig up; the former was more complex. Once Sam had worked up some example flowcharts of what he thought such dialogue should feel like, I implemented them as simple command-line sketches, printing and receiving input from STDIO. That helped me debug my logic around how I was choosing what piece of content to show next – and meant that once I’d solved the logic, I could port it into the stateful, database-driven Playable City code without also having to decide how it worked.

I also began thoroughly documenting the processes and logic involved to make them visible to the rest of the team, and to aid decision making. That’s also going to be useful as we try to put together a “burndown” – a canonical list of everything left to do.

Sore is still very much in development, but a long meeting on Thursday hashed out what it might be better, derisking some parts of it, adding a few new features, and over the weekend I spent a little time pulling together two prototypes: one, of the software that will drive out; the other, of a book it can produce. It’s an unusual project: a creative collaboration, but very much whatever I want it to be, so pushing it to some unusual places. In this case, into materials that are going to be interesting to work with: equal parts software, hardware, and print.

I spent a day in Sheffield this week, for a short piece of design consultancy with Rattle. A really good workshop: some suitably curvy thinking, good sketching, and the result was a somewhat curious piece of media invention: inventing a media format for data visualisation.

A second day in the studio wrote this up with sketches, notes, and animatics. I think it’s gone in an interesting direction, though it’ll be interesting to see how it develops once it’s in the hands of makers: that’s where the meat of this work will be.

On Hello Lamppost – Muncaster – this week, the big news was the launch of the trailer. That’s had a great response, from both friends and the media. My colleagues at PAN sure do know how to make charming, informative short films.

Lots of meaty work on Hello Lamppost, too: defining and designing the final types of interaction, and also working out what we need the website to do. The coming weeks are going to be very busy on that front, burning down to launch, but we’ve got a plan in place: it should turn out well. Ben’s written a great update about everything we’ve been doing over at the Pan blog.

And finally, some communication work – pitching, discussing, scoping – about a project called Sore; bringing the likelihood of it happening closer to the event horizon.

Onwards!

Another bitty, fragmented week, in which the realities of life intruded on the realities of work.

Still, the positives that emerged this week were good: completing the work on last year’s tax return, for instance, alongside various moments of prodding, poking, and tinkering with various software projects. Lots of comms management, too: setting up a workshop day for Week 36, fixing some issues with Concert Club and Playable City, and prototyping a new feature for the latter.

I also took the time to catch up with friends passing through London for EToo, which helped me think a little harder about a personal games project for later in the year.

On Friday morning, I met up with Michael, who I’m mentoring through Northern Media‘s CreateInnovate programme. Over the next four months, we’re going to have regular catchups about the transmedia strategy for a feature film he’s producing. (Translation: the online marketing and promotion plan.) I’m not a huge fan of “the t-word”, but it does feel somewhat appropriate in this case: the film he’s working on has some diegetic elements that would extend very nicely to the outside world. So we’re going to be spending some time thinking those through. Nice to think a bit about strategy and narrative, and we enjoyed bouncing thoughts of one another; I look forward to our future sessions.

As I type, I’m on the way back from a workshop in Sheffield – hence the late delivery of these. Still, the beginnings of a busy week – which I’ll write more about in seven days’ time.

A quiet week, but worth documenting nontheless (if only to remind me of the shape of the year).

The majority of making-work was focused on Playable City – primarily firming up some infrastructure, making a few things more robust, and poking at the forecast.io API to see if there was anything to be done with it.

Otherwise, lots of new business development: some research and a proposal for an art project in September, and a mentoring project I can hopefully write more about shortly.

And, the realities of business: finalising tax returns, talking to accountants; continuing maintenance on live projects.

It’s often on these quiet weeks that weeknotes feel more like a chore than a joy, but I’m holding onto them: they’re useful as a practice, to see the ebb and flow throughout the year. Some weeks are busy, and this one was bitty and quiet. But the main thing it reminds me is how busy things are going to get quite soon. Onwards.

A short week, thanks to a pleasant and much-needed sunny Bank Holiday Monday.

This week involved a bunch of travel. Tuesday was a day in Brighton to discuss a potential art commission, currently referred to as Sore. Lots of interesting thoughts and discussion, but I need to sit down and process it offline a bit. So that’s going to be a focus of early Week 34.

Thursday was a trip to Bristol for the next tests and demonstrations of Hello Lamppost, our Playable City commission.

A secret: I find playtesting painful.

It’s a similar pain – but not identical – to user-testing. If you’ve ever stood on the dark side of a two-way mirror, and watched someone stab with a mouse at a product you’ve designed, failing to achieve a task you were sure was straightforward… you’ll have a glimpse of that pain.

But the element of testing games that I find uniquely painful is what we’re testing for. I’ve watched users fail to complete tasks, which was annoying, because we were designing for utility, for functionality: helping people achieve goals swiftly and simply.

When I test a game, I’m testing to see if it’s fun. Well, and many other things: is it balanced? Is there a skill curve? Would you come back to it? How do experienced and new players work together?

At the bottom of that, though, is a summation of all those questions: is it fun? Did it entertain?

Watching somebody explicitly not have fun with something that’s only purpose is (in one way or another) to entertain – well, that’s more awkward than any transactional website test I’ve done.

So for the duration of playtests, I’m pretty on edge.

First tests are always particularly tough – they should be; they indicate what’s going to need work. I’d be worried if they weren’t. And our first test, a few weeks ago, showed up lots of edges and holes.

Thursday was our second playtest in Bristol, and it was a notable improvement on the first – and satisfying and insightful in its own right. Lots of the rough edges from the first test were sanded away; the new elements of charm were all picked up on; and whilst it may have failed or had obvious holes, they didn’t seem to have the disarming effect of the first test, where players would be jolted out of the experience quite hard.

Also, the 12-year-olds we tested it with definitely enjoyed it, which was a really positive sign. (As was the enthusiasm of the project sponsors, who saw it later that night).

A good day, then: all the work of the previous week, and of some of this, paid off, and we’ve got a much clearer sight of the critical path for the final month. And, slowly, I began to get over my hatred of how playtesting makes me feel.

The week ended with a bit of maintenance work on Concert Club, filing down some rough edges and fixing some bugs that our early users have caught.

Much of this week was spent refactoring Muncaster – the Playable City codebase.

It’s the kind of code that gets fiddly to work with quickly. In making a conversational interface, you quickly move away from the kind of architecture that’s very simple to model in Object-Oriented languages and frameworks, and into something that’s much more about flow and state. As such, there’s lots of flow control and logic.

The catch here is that, in the Playable City design, there’s very little complexity to the “state” end of things, and very little happens on state-transition; instead, most of the weight of the work comes down to the flow control: what to say next, given what we know.

It’s been very easy to get into a “mazy of twisty passages, all alike“, especially as we try to adapt and modify the code based on playtests; there are so many dependencies that you end up walking through the control flow yourself as you code it a lot.

So my goal this week was to build something more final to build upon, tearing out things that didn’t work, and removing as many if statements as possible.

By the end of the week, a large amount of conditional logic had been torn out, and replaced with many, many tiny POROs, all responsible for building up fragments of a conversation, and none of which know anything about state other than the conversation they’re given to work with as input. In some ways, it’s not much simpler, but it’s proving much easier to modify, tweak, and extend, and that feels like it’s been really worth it. Logic has been torn out of the ActiveRecord models, and also become far less dependent on the database, which feels like an architectural win – and should make delivering Week 33’s playtest easier.

On Tuesday, I took part in a collaborative experience design workshop, run by Experientia. I said “yes” to this in part to see what that process was like from the other side of the table, and watch another design firm at work. It was super-rewarding on that front, and gave me some useful thoughts about future practice; also, I got to make lots of drawings with felt pens, which possibly bemused the other participants, but was a great work-out for my design brain.

And, of course, the other big news of the week was that Caper launched Concert Club. This is Detling: the project I’ve been talking about for the past couple of months. I’m really glad to see it in the world, even for its limited prototype lifespan: there are some interesting lessons to learn from it, and it’s been a lovely build process. I wrote more about it in this longer post last week, and I’d encourage you to find our more if you haven’t already.

Week 32 was a lot of code, then, and the usual last-minute wranglings to get a project live, but lots of nice pay-offs. In Week 33, we’ll get to put that code to use.